(no subject)
My earlier post was in reaction to a headline I saw on MSN this morning about how Hawking has changed his mind about black holes and now believes that information does escape them.
The headline read Oops, Hawking flip-flops on blackholes.
This irritates me because the man does science; he works with empirical data and mathematical formulae. Changing one's mind because of evidence is science, not flip-flopping, as they so eloquently put it.
What is it about people that they will cling tenaciously to refuted beliefs, grapsing and clawing at them even into thier own demise? People would rather bring about their own ruin than admit that something they thought was true turned out to be false. The very act of having to admit that one was wrong about something and that new evidence has been brought to light, evidence that contradicts a previously held belief, is the ultimate unspoken shame in this country. The unwritten rule: one should go down in a blaze of stupidity rather than admit that some previously held belief is not the case.
What was one of the loudest-ringing criticisms of John Kerry? He flip-flops. Well heaven forbid that someone in this country assimilate new knowledge and, as a result of that, possibly change their mind on an issue. Instead we should simply pick a stance and stick to it until it destroys us all. The confusion is that adhering to a belief is the same as dogmatically refusing to question a belief. The President can go on TV and say that he "sticks to his guns" or whatever quaint little colloquialism he chooses for the day, and people will unfailing respect that- as if thats the wisest action one could take.
Its pure, unadulterated lunacy to fear the idea of being wrong, but this country has that fear in spades. Whats worse is the assimilation, and subsequent trivialization, of new information- information that contradicts a previously held belief. By accepting new information and then trvializing it, one can sweep it under the rug so that it needn't be dealt with anymore.
I have friends and family who behave similarly. Whenever I engage them in a argument about something they believe they often retort that I "always think I'm so right" or that "I'm a know-it-all" and my response is always the same: I win the argument because I'm not afraid to lose the argument.
I'm not afraid to be wrong, nor am I afraid to be shown that I am wrong. I fear no one's intellect; I am impressed with little in the realm of academic knowledge and acomplishment. Knowledge is knowledge, if I had read that book I would know that too. You just happened to have a collection of interests that led you there; mine led me elsewhere. Instead of being embarassed when I'm shown that I'm wrong, I learn from it. As a result I possess beliefs that are less likely to be contradicted than my previously held beliefs, which I then use in later discussions. Its just that simple. When I argue with people, when they get angry and accuse me of being a know-it-all, I hear them saying something completely different. I hear them reacting to the fact that they have been proven wrong. They cannot abide that, so they project the arrogance onto me, shifting the folly onto my character, relieving themselves of the stress brought about by their failure to recognize they possessed innaccurate or contradictary beliefs.
We are wrong because we're obsessed with being right. We are refuted because we are pathologically obsessed with being the smartest. When we learn how to lose graciously we will learn how to win effectively.
When you internalize your own value system, and use that as a benchmark for achievement, you will achieve more than what you can achieve based on your fear that you're not as smart as someone else. The reason the saying "There is always someone smarter than you" is cliche is because it is a fundamental truth of existence and consequently is repeated ad nauseum.